The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “Glad you came over, Martin,” he said.

  “The name is Thorpe,” I said.

  He didn’t answer, just stepped aside so I could come in. I didn’t see Ruth, but I spotted Marie right away. She was sitting on the divan with her legs pulled up under her and her face hidden. She had a handkerchief pressed in her hand. She was a slim kid, but well developed for fifteen, so well developed in fact that for a while I had been razzed about this at school.

  Like Tommy, she had blond hair, only hers was fluffy and came partway to her shoulders. She turned now and her face was all red from crying, but I still thought she was pretty. I’m a sucker that way. I’ve been a sucker for women ever since I was nine.

  She had wide-spaced green eyes, and soft, rosy skin, and a generous mouth. Her only trouble, if any, was that she was a prude. Wouldn’t speak to anybody on the Clark campus except me. Maybe you think I didn’t like that! I’d met her at Sunday school, or rather coming out, since I had been hiding around waiting for it to let out, and I walked home with her four Sundays straight before she would speak to me. That is, I walked along beside her holding a one-way conversation. Finally I skipped a Sunday, then the next one she asked me where I had been, and that started the ball rolling.

  “Thorpe,” she said — that was another thing, she always called me by my last name because that was the one I had given her to start with — “Thorpe, I’m so glad you’re here. Come over here and sit down beside me.”

  I went over and sat down and she straightened up, like she was ashamed that she had been crying, and put on a pretty good imitation of a smile. “How’s everything been?” she said.

  “Oh, pretty good,” I said. “The freshmen are bellyaching about Latin this week, and just like algebra, I’m already so far ahead of them it’s a crying shame.”

  “You’re so smart, Thorpe,” she told me.

  “Too bad about Tommy,” I said. “There’s always the chance for a reprieve though.”

  “No,” she said, and her eyes began to get dim again, “no, there isn’t. This — this decision that went through Sunday night — that’s the — Unless, of course, something comes up that we — the lawyer can—” and she began crying.

  I put my arm around her, which was a thing she hadn’t let me do much, and I said, “Come on, kid. Straighten up. Tommy wouldn’t want you to cry.”

  About five minutes later she did straighten up. Duff Ryan was sitting over in the corner looking out the window, but it was just like we were alone.

  “I’ll play the piano,” she said.

  “Do you know anything hot yet?”

  “Hot?” she said.

  “Something popular, Marie,” I explained. Blood was coming up into my face.

  “Why, no,” she replied. “I thought I would —”

  “Play hymns!” I half screamed. “No! I don’t want to hear any of those damned hymns!”

  “Why, Thorpe!”

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ve told you about that enough times. Those kinds of songs just drone along in the same pitch and never get anywhere. If you can’t play something decent stay away from the piano.”

  My fists were tight now and my fingers were going in and out. She knew better than to bring up that subject. It was the only thing we had ever argued about. Playing hymns. I wanted to go nuts every time I heard “Lead Kindly Light” or one of those other goofy things. I’d get so mad I couldn’t see straight. Just an obsession with me, I guess.

  “All right,” she said, “but I wish you wouldn’t swear in this house.”

  I said, “All right, I won’t swear in this house.”

  “Or anywhere else,” she said.

  I was feeling good now. “OK, honey, if you say so.”

  She seemed pleased, and at least the argument had gotten her to quit thinking about Tommy for a minute. But it was then that her sister came downstairs.

  Ruth was built on a smaller scale than Marie so that even though she was nineteen she wasn’t any taller. She had darker hair too, and an oval face, very white now, making her brown eyes seem brighter. Brighter though more hollow. I will say she was beautiful.

  She wore only a rich blue lounging robe, which was figure-fitting though it came down past her heels and was clasped in a high collar around her pale throat.

  “I think it’s time for you to come to bed, Marie,” she said. “Hello, Thorpe.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  Marie got up wordlessly and pressed my hand, and smiled again, that faint imitation, and went off. Ruth stood there in the doorway from the dining room and as though it was a signal — which I suspect it was — Duff Ryan got up.

  “I guess it’s time for us to go, Martin,” he said.

  “You don’t say,” I said.

  He looked at me fishily. “Yeah. I do say. We’ve got a job to do. Do you know what it is, Martin? We’ve got to kill a kitten. A poor little kitten.”

  I started to answer but didn’t. The way he was saying that, and looking at me, put a chill up my back that made me suddenly ice cold. I began to tremble all over. He opened the door and motioned for me to go out.

  ~ * ~

  That cat thing was a gag of some kind, I thought, and I was wide awake for any funny stuff from detectives, but Duff Ryan actually had a little kitten hidden in a box under the front steps of the house. He picked it up now and petted it.

  “Got hit by a car,” he said. “It’s in terrible pain and there isn’t a chance for recovery. I gave it a shot of stuff that eased the pain for a while but it must be coming back. We’ll have to kill the cat.”

  I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t killed it in the first place, whenever he had picked it up from under the car, but I kept my mouth shut and we walked along, back across the street to the Clark campus. There were no lights at all here and we walked in darkness, our feet scuffing on the dirt of the football gridiron.

  “About that night of the murder, Martin,” Duff said. “You won’t mind a few more questions, will you? We want to do something to save Tommy. I made the arrest but I’ve been convinced since that he’s innocent. I want desperately to save him before it’s too late. It’s apparent that we missed on something because — well, the way things are.”

  I said, “Are you sure of Tommy’s innocence, or are you stuck on Ruth?”

  “Sure of his innocence,” he said in that soft voice. “You want to help, don’t you, Martin? You don’t want to see Tommy die?”

  “Quit talking to me like a kid,” I said. “Sure I want to help.”

  “All right. What were you doing over there that night?”

  “I’ve answered that a dozen times. Once in court. I was seeing Marie.”

  “Mr. Smith — that is, her father — chased you out of the house though, didn’t he?”

  “He asked me to leave,” I said.

  “No, he didn’t, Martin. He ordered you out and told you not to come back again.”

  I stopped and whirled toward him. “Who told you that?”

  “Marie,” he said. “She was the only one who heard him. She didn’t want to say it before because she was afraid Ruth would keep her from seeing you. That little kid has a crush on you and she didn’t think that had any bearing on the case.”

  “Well, it hasn’t, has it?”

  “Maybe not,” snapped Duff Ryan, “but he did chase you out, didn’t he? He threatened to use his cane on you?”

  “I won’t answer,” I said.

  “You don’t have to,” he told me. “But I wish you’d told the truth about it in the first place.”

  “Why?” We started walking again. “You don’t think I killed him, do you?” I shot a quick glance in his direction and held my breath.

  “No,” he said, “nothing like that, only—”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, Martin, haven’t you been kicked out of about every school in the state?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say every school.”

  Duff said, “
Quite a few though, eh?”

  “Enough,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought.” He went on quietly, “I went over and had a look at your record, Martin. I wish I had thought of doing that sooner.”

  “Listen —”

  “Oh, don’t get excited,” he said, “this may give us new leads, that’s all. We’ve nothing against you. But when you were going to school at Hadden, you took the goat, which was a class mascot, upstairs with you one night and then pushed him down the stairs so that he broke all his legs. You did that, didn’t you?”

  “The goat slipped,” I said.

  “Maybe,” whispered Duff. He lit a cigarette, holding on to the crippled cat with one hand. “But you stood at the top of the stairs and watched the goat suffer until somebody came along.”

  “I was so scared I couldn’t move.”

  “Another time,” Duff continued, “at another school, you pushed a kid into an oil hole that he couldn’t get out of and you were ducking him — maybe trying to kill him — when someone came along and stopped you.”

  “He was a sissy. I was just having some fun!”

  “At another school you were expelled for roping a newly born calf and pulling it up on top of a barn where you stabbed it and watched it bleed to death.”

  “I didn’t stab it! It got caught on a piece of tin from the drain while I was pulling it up. You haven’t told any of this to Marie, have you?”

  “No,” Duff said.

  “All those things are just natural things,” I said. “Any kid is liable to do them. You’re just nuts because you can’t pin the guilt on anybody but the guy who is going to die Friday and you’re trying to make me look bad!”

  “Maybe,” Duff answered quietly, and we came into the chapel now and stopped. He dropped his cigarette, stepped on it, then patted the cat. Moonlight shone jaggedly through the rotting pillars. I could see the cat’s eyes shining. “Maybe,” Duff breathed again, “but didn’t you land in a reform school once?”

  “Twice,” I said.

  “And once in an institution where you were observed by a staff of doctors? It was a state institution, I think. Sort of a rest home.”

  “I was there a month,” I said. “Some crab sent me there, or had me sent. But my dad got me out.”

  “Yes,” Duff replied, “the crab had you sent there because you poisoned two of his Great Dane dogs. Your dad had to bribe somebody to get you out, and right now he pays double tuition for you here at Clark’s.”

  I knew all this but it wasn’t anything sweet to hear coming from a detective. “What of it?” I said. “You had plenty of chance to find that out.”

  “But we weren’t allowed to see your records before,” Duff answered. “As a matter of fact I paid an orderly to steal them for me, and then return them.”

  “Why, you dirty crook!”

  I could see the funny twist of his smile there in the moonlight. His face looked pale and somehow far away. He looked at the cat and petted it some more. I was still shaking. Scared, I guess.

  He said, “Too bad we have to kill you, kitten, but it’s better than that pain.”

  Then, all at once I thought he had gone mad. He swung the cat around and began batting its head against the pillar in the chapel. I could see the whole thing clearly in the moonlight, his arm swinging back and forth, the cat’s head being battered off, the bright crimson blood spurting all over.

  He kept on doing it and my temples began to pound. My heart went like wildfire. I wanted to reach over and help him. I wanted to take that little cat and squeeze the living guts out of it. I wanted to help him smash its brains all over the chapel. I felt dizzy. Everything was going around. I felt myself reaching for the cat.

  But I’m smart. I’m no dummy. I’m at the head of my class. I’m in high school. I knew what he was doing. He was testing me. He wanted me to help him. The son of a-wasn’t going to trick me like that. Not Martin Thorpe. I put my arms behind me and grabbed my wrists and with all my might I held my arms there and looked the other way.

  I heard the cat drop with a thud to the cement, then I looked up, gasping to catch my breath. Duff Ryan looked at me with cool gray eyes, then he walked off. I stood there, still trying to get my breath and watching his shadow blend with the shadows of the dark study hall. I was having one hell of a time getting my breath.

  ~ * ~

  But I slept good all night. I was mad and I didn’t care about Tommy anymore. Let him hang. I slept good but I woke up ten minutes before reveille remembering that it was Pushton’s turn at the bugle again. He and Myers traded off duty every other day.

  I felt pretty cocky and got up putting on only my slippers and went down to the eleven-year-old wing. Pushton was sitting on the edge of the bed working his arms back and forth and yawning. The fat little punk looked like an old man. He took himself that seriously. You would have thought maybe he was a general.

  “What you want, Thorpe?” he said.

  “I want your bugle. I’m going to break the damn thing.”

  “You leave my bugle alone,” he said. “My folks aren’t as rich as yours and I had to save all my spending money to buy it.” This was true. They furnished bugles at school but they were awful and Pushton took his music so seriously that he had saved up and bought his own instrument.

  “I know it,” I said, “so the school won’t be on my neck if I break it.” I looked around. “Where is it?”

  “I won’t tell you!”

  I looked under the bed, under his pillow, then I grabbed him by the nose. “Come on, Heinie. Where is it?”

  “Leave me alone!” he wailed. “Keep your hands off me.” He was talking so loud now that half the wing was waking up.

  “All right, punk,” I said. “Go ahead and blow that thing, and I hope you blow your tonsils out.”

  I went back to my bed and held my ears. Pushton blew the bugle all right, I never did find out where he had the thing hidden.

  I dressed thinking, well, only two more days and Tommy gets it. I’d be glad when it was over. Maybe all this tension would ease up then and Marie wouldn’t cry so much because once he was dead there wouldn’t be anything she could do about it. Time would go by and eventually she would forget him. One person more or less isn’t so important in the world anyway, no matter how good a guy he is.

  Everything went swell Wednesday right through breakfast and until after we were marching out of the chapel and into the schoolroom. Then I ran into Pushton, who was trotting around with his bugle tucked under his arm. I stopped and looked him up and down.

  His little black eyes didn’t flicker. He just said, “Next time you bother me, Thorpe, I’m going to report you.”

  “Go ahead, punk,” I said, “and see what happens to you.”

  I went on into school then, burning up at his guts, talking to me that way.

  I was still burned up and sore at the guy when a lucky break came, for me, that is, not Pushton. It was during the afternoon right after we had been dismissed from the classroom for the two-hour recreation period.

  I went into the main building, which was prohibited in the daytime so that I had to sneak in, to get a book I wanted to read. It was under my pillow. I slipped up the stairs, crept into my wing, got the book, and started out. It was then that I heard a pounding noise.

  I looked around, then saw it was coming from the eleven-year-old wing.

  I walked in and there it was! You wouldn’t have believed anything so beautiful could have been if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes. At least that was the way I felt about it. For who was it but Pushton.

  The bugler on duty has the run of the main building and it was natural enough that he was here, but I hadn’t thought about it. There was a new radio set, a small portable, beside his bed. I saw that the wires and earphone — which you have to use in the dormitory—were connected with the adjoining bed as well and guessed that it belonged to another cadet. But Pushton was hooking it up. He was leaning halfway out the window tryin
g, pounding with a hammer, to make some kind of a connection on the aerial wire.

  Nothing could have been better. The window was six stories from the ground, with cement down below. No one knew I was in the building. I felt blood surge into my temples. My face got red, hot red, and I could feel fever throbbing in my throat. I moved forward slowly, on cat feet, my hands straight at my sides. I didn’t want him to hear me. But I was getting that dizzy feeling now. My fingers were itching.

  Then suddenly I lunged over, I shoved against him. He looked back once, and that was what I wanted. He looked back for an instant, his fat face green with the most unholy fear I have ever seen. Then I gave him another shove and he was gone. Before he could call out, before he could say a word, he was gone, falling through the air!